mcgophie

I love my brother. There isn’t a lot I wouldn’t do for him. I’m the only one allowed to make fun of him, annoy him to his wits end. We watch movies together and I steal his taquitos but it’s okay because I make dinner for him sometimes and I know him better than anyone else. We used to do our laundry together. It was the only time in my life I’d separate my dark clothes from my white clothes. We used bleach. He knows about the celebrities I crush on, and he tells me about the girls he talks to. (He hardly ever tells me their names, but I know the shy girl and the one from the reunion, and the one he ghosted but then talked to again a couple months ago. The shy girl has a boyfriend now, and he ghosted the other one again.) I worry about him more than I’ve ever worried about someone. I always worry about him. He’s the only person in my life I don’t think I could live without, and he’s the one person I worry most about dying. It’s not a pleasant feeling, but it’s my feeling, and it’s my feeling about my brother. It’s my feeling that shows just how much I love him. Because it’s my brother. My brother. I’ll stomach the most uncomfortable feeling because it’s my brother and no fight will ever make me hate him more than I love him.

Nothing makes me want to write anymore. And I don’t mean word vomit or shitty poems. I want to write something meaningful. Something inspiring. Something factual, an analysis of a movie or a great insight into the government or something powerful, about gentrification or deforestation or a thousand other issues I want to talk about. I feel uninspired. School made it easy. They’d give me a topic or an issue or even just an outline and I could create something. I could do something with it. I can’t create something out of nothing. There’s just too much to care about. 

There’s something about standing in your bedroom, packing for college. Listening to music 7-year old you wouldn’t be caught dead listening to you. (One Direction isn’t approved by older brothers.) You're in a new pair of socks, ones that scrunch at the top and you feel cute, even with your oversized t-shirt. The pictures and notes and your wall are the first thing to go. You know what to do with most of the notes; they go in the trash. You don’t talk to any of your middle school friends anymore, and their words don’t mean what they used to. You keep pictures, the ones with good memories or sweet memories or memories you can’t bear to part with. (Any notes or pictures of your ex are long gone.) A band poster is on the wall, and your bulletin board is overflowing. You don’t know where to put it, where to put your life. Maybe it’ll stay in the back of your parents garage until they die, or it’ll come with you everywhere you go and everywhere you move because the garbage on it holds too much to let go, too much to let rot. You don’t know where to put anything anymore.

I’ve been stuck on defining my favorite things for as long as I’ve known. My favorite animal, song, or color. I can’t define any one of those things. I like what I like. My favorite color is the color of orange clouds on a blue sky at sunset. Or it’s the green of leaves on trees as I walk under them. Maybe I like the red of my favorite socks more, or the soft shade of brown my bread turns into when it’s baking. The stark blue of my brother's eyes, the pink of the mountains during sunrise, everything has a meaning to me, every moment is my favorite. I love strawberries, but the bananas and oatmeal this morning is better than any breakfast I’ve had. There’s a difference in defining living and actually living. The latter is much harder than the first. I can define how I live. I can define the color of the ocean, or the smell of gasoline. Words can shape how my bed feels, physically. They cannot define how I feel at night, crawling under the covers to sleep. How I feel swimming the ocean, terrified out of my mind but learning how to live with it. They can’t define the feeling I get when the scent of gasoline brings me back to go-karting and vacations and the feeling of loving my family. Music on Sunday evenings, cooking dinner and napping and soft rain and books. I’m sitting here, describing my life in words I don’t know how to use to tell you how I felt. How I feel.

My words are rusty. It’s been weeks since I’ve written and I think it’s losing its touch, if I ever had one. Maybe my words have always been blank. I write into an abyss and I hope no one’s looking. It could be embarrassing. My words, my lifeblood, my soul mixed into black letters. Bared for the world to see. I’m bared for the world to see my desperation, my repetition, my unoriginality and the vomit I leave on the page in my wake. Everything I need to say has been said already. What more can I do but repeat? Rephrase every word I’ve heard and try to make something new out of a thousand year old clay. Sow the earth after the generations before left it dry. Steal every thought, every metaphor, every clever moment from the millions that have come before me, for the millions after me to pillage. Everything I want to say has already been said. 

It’s dreadfully important to focus on the little things. When life feels so dull and like there’s no escape, just waiting for the next thing to happen, there’s little things. Everyone uses sunsets as an example. I never understood that; sunsets aren’t little. Yes, they happen every day, but every one is different. The sky explodes with color and beauty and there’s nothing quite like it. It’s huge. It’s meaningful and impactful and too many people call it something little. The little things are everything from sunrise to sunset to sunrise again. It’s carrying in your groceries, breathing in the air of your home and a smell you can’t notice because it’s your scent. It’s cutting up a bowl of fruits. It’s tracing your hand over the pattern of your comforter, feeling all the grooves and none of the stains. It’s a new necklace no one noticed but you love anyway. It’s the sound of your brother’s footsteps in the other room as he’s making breakfast, steady and consistent and dragging across the floor. It’s the papers and pieces of life falling off your bulletin board that you have to pin back up. It’s the sunlight on your face as you slowly fall asleep, warm and content and not unlike a cat. It’s those moments that make you feel alive. Like a person. Like life has some resemblance of meaning, when everything seems dull and boring. It’s not dull and boring, it’s just a piece of life I’m not fully living.

There’s some moments that you are so proud of, but you can’t share with anyone. No one celebrates your accomplishment with you, and you only have yourself to smile at. It doesn’t make it any less special. There was a guy I thought I loved. He hurt me, and he hurt me a lot. I hurt for a whole year. When I saw him today, I didn’t recognize him at first. I had to see his sister before I realized who it was. I couldn’t tell my parents, because they don’t know he exists. I couldn’t tell my best friend, because she hated him and I think she’d rather never hear his name. No one would understand how important this moment was. I couldn’t stop smiling. I was free. It’d been over two years and I was finally free. I didn’t think about him anymore and I didn’t hurt anymore. What a special moment, to be free.

I think authors have characters say the things they are too ashamed to say themselves. They have to make up a whole different person to say what they want to say. It is only okay to say in fiction. In song, poem, or story. I’m not creative enough for that. I have to say what I am going to say. There’s no one to hide behind, no facade that hides who I really am. These shitty words tumble out of my mouth and onto paper and it is the hard, ugly truth of who I am.

It’s scary to want something. There’s been so many times I’ve held myself back from saying what I truly feel. No, I won’t wait for you. No, I’m not too old for that. Yes, I’d love to. I like you, I don’t like you. I feel, at so many points in my life, I missed that yes or that no. I have my fair share of regrets. It’s scary to want something. It’s scary to want something and fail. A boy who slips past your fingers before you realize you’re better than this. A girl who you couldn’t let yourself love. A test you studied so hard for and failed so miserably. Parents who don’t show up at your competition. A job you weren’t accepted to. It’s scary to want something and fail. It’s more scary to want something and not go for it. There’s a girl who’s supposed to text me back. We don’t have enough time, but I told her how I felt anyway. I told that boy, years ago, exactly what he could do with his misplaced apologies. And yeah, I might get rejected from a college program I want more than anything. But it’s more scary to want it and to let it pass me by. I’ve jumped out of a plane before. In that moment, right before the fall, I was terrified. It was my last chance to change my mind. I knew, getting on that plane, calmer than a clam, that there was only one way I was coming down. More scary than jumping was the thought of not jumping. No more regrets.

If there’s one thing I have to believe, it’s that this light I have inside me exists in everyone. This hopeful, horrid feeling that makes me want to try, and to love, and to hold all that’s close gently. I have to believe this wonderful sensation sending goosebumps down my skin and tears to my eyes and love to my hands exists everywhere, all around all of us. How could someone live without that? I feel everything so deeply and wonderfully and I can’t help but shed a tear over sad movies and laugh in the kitchen when my brother spills his pizza rolls. Those moments, where parts of you start to spill out on your best friend’s bathroom floor because there is nowhere else you’d rather be than in this moment. Who is God to deny someone the right to feel that love, among all the suffering and cruelty of it all?